"People see smallholder farmers in India, and they assume that, oh well, you must not use technology. Well no, dipshit, we really do," observes Omnivore cofounder Mark Kahn, who says too often, outsiders still frame the market through the lens of charity or impact. From hyper-fragmented supply chains that have steadily organized, to service-based business models that turn expensive equipment into affordable opex and a new wave of farm-to-consumer success stories, India has evolved its own highly efficient agricultural playbook, says Kahn.
Has investment in Indian agrifoodtech followed a similar trajectory to the rest of the world? Mark is asked.
"Yes in the sense that global venture capital increased in that time, but no in that the drivers of agrifoodtech in India looked nothing like agrifoodtech in the West, where you had billions going into alt protein and vertical farming. The agritech liftoff in India had very little to do with the agritech liftoff in the US. It really had to do with the fact that starting in 2016, what had been an e-commerce boom [in b2c] from 2008 onwards, stalled, though not in a bad sense.
Suddenly, no one was giving people any more money to do a new [b2c] e-commerce platform, so people turned their attention to the b2b opportunity in India, in particular, this concept of b2b marketplaces. The first big one was called Udaan, which was founded by alumni of [b2c e-commerce site] Flipkart. And then other things came from that… because the second you start looking at small businesses in India, you suddenly discover that a lot of them are agrifood related."
Read more at AgFunder News
